NORA SCHATTAUER

Biography

Nora Schattauer deals with questions of form and pictorial processes that cross the conventional categories. Her work includes drawing and painting, lines and colour, but she does not use them in a conventional way, but rather as the result of the intervention of newly proven processes.

The artist works with chemical solutions and mineral salts, which are applied to the paper in a controlled manner, in such a way that an almost regular, constantly new and varied pattern forms the basic framework. The substances react with the paper, create compounds and undergo subsequent colour changes that materialise in time. The result is not totally controllable, although empirical values enable some possibilities of control. The unexpected retains its constitutive function. Structured construction and coloured appearance are inextricably interwoven. The microscopic variety of forms awaken associations with nature, the pulsation evoking memories of processual workflows. In their approach, her works hark back far into the history of nature.

The variety of shapes and the colour gradations is almost unlimited, gaining its allure through the variation of the similar. There is no schematism of grid-like, serial work in the images. Everything appears to be gently oscillating, whether the images include larger or denser, closed or open structures and internal forms, regardless of the lines and grid formations present, or how the colour changes. There appears to be a polar category immanent in the images. There is a fluctuation and vibration in the surface, a forwards and backwards movement, an oscillating in their depth, the interaction of line and colour, and the interplay of the reversal of pattern and base. And there is an inner cohesion in them all.